Indeed, until quite lately—­say, until about the ’80’s or so—­most news printed was really news about things which people wanted to understand.  However garbled or truncated or falsified, it at least dealt with interesting matters which the newspaper proprietors had not started as a hare of their own, and which the public, as a whole, was determined to hear something about.  Even to-day, apart from the war, there is a large element of this.

There was (and is) a further check upon the artificiality of the news side of the Press; which is that Reality always comes into its own at last.

You cannot, beyond a certain limit of time, burke reality.

In a word, the Press must always largely deal with what are called “living issues.”  It can boycott very successfully, and does so, with complete power.  But it cannot artificially create unlimitedly the objects of “news.”

There is, then, this much truth in the old figment of the Press being “an organ of opinion,” that it must in some degree (and that a large degree) present real matter for observation and debate.  It can and does select.  It can and does garble.  But it has to do this always within certain limitations.

These limitations have, I think, already been reached; but that is a matter which I argue more fully later on.

VII

As to opinion, you have the same limitations.

If opinion can be once launched in spite of, or during the indifference of, the Press (and it is a big “if"); if there is no machinery for actually suppressing the mere statement of a doctrine clearly important to its readers—­then the Press is bound sooner or later to deal with such doctrine:  just as it is bound to deal with really vital news.

Here, again, we are dealing with something very different indeed from that title “An organ of opinion” to which the large newspaper has in the past pretended.  But I am arguing for the truth that the Press—­in the sense of the great Capitalist newspapers—­cannot be wholly divorced from opinion.

We have had three great examples of this in our own time in England.  Two proceeded from the small wealthy class, and one from the mass of the people.

The two proceeding from the small wealthy classes were the Fabian movement and the movement for Women’s Suffrage.  The one proceeding from the populace was the sudden, brief (and rapidly suppressed) insurrection of the working classes against their masters in the matter of Chinese Labour in South Africa.